I saw a 5-year-old purple-faced dragon at Sam’s Club trying to go ingognito. She was wearing the lace-up pink boots that everyone knows is what frogs wear when they want to go out on the town. She couldn’t fool me!
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I ran across a poignant article while researching the difficult topic of how parents should use the internet to gain medical information – truly, it sounds simple BUT IT’S NOT.
There is a mind-blowing amount of information exposed by a search on Google for about any medical condition! Unfortunately, there is also an incredible amount of crap exposed in that same search!
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My memory of Ryan White, unfortunately like most others, centers around breaking the bigotry over school attendance and as the most well known child with the disease AIDS when not much was certain about the virus.
An entirely different view, the view described in this video, is of a gentle, accepting, tolerant, forgiving and very, very… very brave boy.
I’m glad I got to see this video. Thanks Ryan
The old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” is, perhaps, no more true than in the case of the AIDS epidemic. I call it an epidemic cause when 1.2 MILLION U.S. citizens are living with it daily (34 million world wide) I think it’s time to call a spade a spade. And that was in 2011, the last year we seem to have tallied the stats.
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Ryan White was a child born with hemophilia (a blood clotting disease) at the unfortunate time when the AIDS virus had become an epidemic. The treatment of his hemophilia with blood products gave him the AIDS virus through no fault of his own. His life was thrust into turmoil, but perhaps not so much because he had been given a terminal disease as because of the needless bigotry he had to endure.
Despite medical opinion and advice to the contrary, Ryan’s school district was more afraid of bigots than medical evidence. Some thought Ryan’s mother insensitive in putting Ryan through the litigation necessary to reverse the weak school board’s stance. Just the opposite was the case and we all owe the Whites a debt of gratitude. Their actions became the catalyst for better handling of blood products by the Red Cross and blood banks everywhere – people stopped getting AIDS from transfusions. Public awareness made the lives of those with the disease easier to live and congress got to hear the testimony of a brave, brave boy.
Thanks Ryan
We’re talking about ‘travel diseases’ which should be considered before taking a trip ‘abroad’ either with or without the family in tow. Yes, from the standpoint of living in the U.S. most of these seem vague and ‘out there somewhere’ but not associated with our daily worries.
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The summer travel season is upon us, at least here in the U.S., and for most of us it means dusting off the car games for the kids to use between bathroom stops as we cruise across the country on vacation.
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Over 15 years ago I wrote an article bemoaning the fact that we were into a generation where even grandmas, the traditional mentor of first-time parents, hadn’t seen a case of measles; and what a loss of valuable information passing across generations.
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In 2014, the world avoided a global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers — plus, frankly, some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. So, now’s the time, Bill Gates suggests, to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training. As he says, “There’s no need to panic … but we need to get going.”
[ Original video at TED: Bill Gates: next outbreak ]
I’ve already given a link to an article describing how to be a friend to someone with a baby in the NICU; but, I’m a bit between a rock and a hard place with this article.
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Meet Mackenzie Cooper from Sydney, Australia who contracted meningitis when he was 3 years old. Anne photographed him and his family when he was 10. He’s now 11 (2015). If there is difficulty viewing the content from youTube, the original can be found here.
Like Ansel Adams, Anne Geddes also has a humanitarian bent and has completed 12 photographs memorializing “survivors” of the disease meningitis – Neisseria Meningitidis to be exact. The disease exacts a terrible toll on its victims but can largely be prevented with an immunization. Her excerpt about the entire project can be viewed here.
There is also a Tumblr portfolio of the entire project and photographs – all 12 of them can be viewed here.
Ok, after several posts about the Measles “crisis,” let’s see how much you know about the disease and what it’s currently doing to children in the US (2014-15). This little quiz was given on a website designed for physicians and I’ll let you see how well people on the website did on the same questions.
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